Offchain Labs is a NYC-based provider of scaling solutions for Ethereum centered on its Arbitrum One Layer 2 platform. Arbitrum One mainnet has opened to the public and is designed to be developer-friendly, enabling Ethereum users to transact with very low fees. Since Arbitrum One's beta developer launch in May, over 350 projects have signed up for access. The company plans to scale its team, further develop the Arbitrum One ecosystem, and build out new scaling solutions in its pipeline. It also intends to invest in research and development to advance its offerings. Offchain Labs was co-founded by Ed Felten, Steven Goldfeder and Harry Kalodner. The company raised $120M in Series B funding to support these efforts. Offchain Labs spun out of research at Princeton and is developing Arbitrum, a protocol designed to scale smart contracts while giving companies greater privacy by shifting part of execution off the public blockchain. The company’s co-founder Ed Felten is a Princeton computer science professor who previously served as Deputy CTO to the White House. Arbitrum aims to boost transactions-per-second, support larger contracts with more data, and let developers control who can see contract activity. The platform includes an "Any Trust Guarantee," where contracts specify validators and will execute correctly as long as at least one validator acts honestly. Offchain Labs plans to release the protocol as open source to increase adoption. The startup announced a $3.7M seed round to help complete a Beta version of Arbitrum, which the team says is close to finished. The team acknowledges competition from incumbents like IBM and SAP but believes its approach addresses persistent scalability and privacy problems for enterprise blockchain developers.

Total raised

$124M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Sep 2021